by Gee, Maurice
They stayed for the rest of the morning and the early part of the afternoon. She pushed Sam high; she let him walk around on the grass. She had a swing herself, making the iron couplings shriek. At one o’clock she spent the last of her money on a pie from the Indian dairy. She and Sam shared it in the playground. She took his bottle into a house and asked for some water, and drank half of it herself – tried the teat but couldn’t make it work. ‘How do you do it, Sam? My God, you’re clever.’ All the time she pushed down the fear, Where do I go? She would not think of her house, down the hill, where she and Jody and Danny had lived. All she would think was, I’ll bet Jasmine’s gone.
The sun started angling down the sky. When the shadow gets to that first swing, Leeanne promised. She started down, jolting in the pot holes. Sam was worn out and went to sleep. She walked through a cutting with broken concrete on the sides and new graffiti – Killing Bambi – done in red. Brent’s place, her place, was over there, locked up by the cops; and down this way … She got to the end of the street; saw the dented cars in the panel beater’s yard; saw the broken fence and the letter box. Danny’s car was parked outside the house. He shouldn’t be home … Then Danny came on to the porch with a can of beer. He stretched his arms in the sun and sat down on the step. Leanne heard the click and hiss as he opened the can.
She walked backwards. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, Sam.’ He slept on, whistling through his nose. She got out of sight behind a car, then turned and ran the pushchair to the end of the street. We’ve got to find a room. We’ve got to get some money! But we can’t say who we are any more. Not Rosser, Sam.
She went up the hill and came to the dairy; climbed the pushchair over the step, left it standing by the door.
‘Look,’ she said to the Indian, ‘I’m broke and I’ve got to find a room. Can you lend me some money?’
‘Broke?’ he said, making his eyes go a darker brown.
‘Yeah, no money. Can you lend me some?’
‘You go away now. Right away.’
She went to the supermarket bag hanging on the pushchair and found her pocketknife – apple-peeling knife – in the bottom. Went back to the counter.
‘You’ve got some in the till. Quick,’ she said.
The blade was not even open. He reached out and took it from her hand. Said, sadly, ‘I pretend I don’t see you.’ He put the knife under the counter. He put a bar of candy in her hand. ‘For your little boy. Quickly, go.’
Crying again. Tears on her face. ‘Can I use your phone? Just one call?’
‘One. Then you go. I get cross soon.’
She went behind the counter. ‘Dad,’ she said, ‘is that you, Dad?’
‘Leeanne, thank God. Ah, Leeanne.’
‘Dad, I’ve got nowhere to go. Me and Sam.’
‘Leeanne, Brent … ’
‘I know, I know.’
‘Quickly,’ the Indian said.
‘I can’t talk. I’m borrowing a phone. Can we come, just one night?’
‘She’s gone, Leeanne. Your mother’s gone. She left three days ago, before we knew.’
‘Where?’
‘She’s gone to those people, church people, in the Hutt. Come home, Leeanne. There’s only me.’
‘Dad – ’
‘Get on the bus.’
‘I’ve got no money. Not even a fare.’
‘Wait at the station then. I’ll come in. You know which unit?’
‘Sure,’ she said, ‘I been catching it all my life.’
She hung up.
‘Thank you,’ she said to the Indian.
‘I keep the knife.’
‘Yes, keep it. Thank you.’
She walked through Mt Cook, down Cuba Street and Willis Street and Lambton Quay. Passed the Beehive and the new building for the court.
Her father got off the Upper Hutt unit. His face was ten years older than it should be.
‘Don’t cry, Dad. Dad, don’t cry.’
‘Leeanne, Brent … ’
‘I know, I know.’ She hugged him, she held him, while people went by looking the other way. Then she wiped his face with his handkerchief. It was ironed by her mother – her last ironing.
I’ll do that, I’ll do the housework now.
‘Won’t she come back, with this thing about Brent?’ she said on the unit.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Won’t she want her share of the house?’
‘We’ll wait and see.’
Yeah, Leeanne thought, let’s wait and see.
Along by the harbour, on the earthquake fault. Up the hill, the crash hill, over the top.
‘Look, Sam. Wainui.’ He stood on her father’s knee, holding him by the ear. ‘I grew up there.’ So did Brent. ‘It’s a good place, Sam. It’s the best.’
They got off at the bus stop and unhooked the pushchair from the bus. Her father pushed along the concrete footpath, by the grass. Leeanne carried the bag. She saw the macrocarpa tree she had climbed as a girl – lopped now, butchered – across the football field, beside the creek. She saw the dry culvert where Brent had hidden with his comics and his stolen cigarettes. And her dad with his belt off, trying to give hidings. That was what fathers had to do. Poor Dad.
I’ll look after you, Dad. I’ll do the ironing. Me and you and Sam, eh, we’ll be okay here.
She opened the gate for them. He pushed Sam up the path.
Chapter Fourteen
Howie Peet was pleased with the season and the day. Auckland was turning on its sunshine for Damon. A breeze came up the cliff face and bent across the lawn, bringing a smell of medicine and tar. It rattled the flax leaves and sent a shiver over the swimming pool. Cool air moved on his chest and made his belly hair stir and tickle.
‘I’ll give you five dollars if you can find a cloud in the sky.’
‘There’s one over there by Rangitoto.’
‘That’s smoke from a ship.’
‘No it’s not. Five dollars please.’
Damon was right. Anyway, ships steamed along smokeless today – and you couldn’t say ‘steamed’. It made Howie pause and search for other words that had lost their meaning. Fly, he thought; aeroplanes don’t fly, they don’t flap wings.
‘Double or quits,’ he said. ‘I’ll bet that seagull doesn’t flap his wings for another minute.’
‘Okay, you’re on … He did. Just once.’
‘That wasn’t a flap. He moved them to balance himself.’
‘There, he flapped. He did it that time. It’s only – fifteen seconds.’
‘Yeah, he flapped.’
Howie wanted everything to go right for the boy. They had not gone right in the first few days. He had found Damon sitting by the cliff with tears on his face. It had made him want to stroke his hair and hug him by the shoulders.
‘Are you thinking about your mother?’
‘No.’
‘What’s wrong then?’
‘Nothing. I’m all right.’
Later, Howie had been disappointed. Boys shouldn’t cry. It disturbed him that Damon made him think of Gordon. He had even, once, called him Gordon by mistake. Gwen didn’t help, writing letters all the time. There were three letters in the boy’s first week, full of stuff about Ulla, Howie would bet. Damon should be allowed to let her settle in place – not forget, of course, but get her sorted out in his mind so she didn’t have him crying behind doors. Damon took his letters to his room and read them shut in. That wasn’t healthy. One more letter from Gwen and Howie was going to tell her to leave the boy alone. You concentrate on Olivia, he would say. I’ll look after Damon, I know how boys tick.
The trampoline was a big success. Howie hadn’t known how good Damon was. He hadn’t known the things you could do on a trampoline. You could fly – Damon could fly. Spread out, sinewy, he lay on the air; he banked like an aeroplane and sprang up, rigid, like an African deer, a gazelle. (Darlene clapped as though she was at a concert.) It had to do with timing and balance. Howie liked that, but he would have liked more
freedom in there too. He would teach Damon to box soon; he would buy some practice gloves and a punch bag and a speed-ball. In the meantime he taught him snooker shots. The boy was good, he had a good eye.
And he was amazing in the water. He can swim like an eel, Howie’s mother had said of him, and Damon was the same, his body seemed to have no joints in the water. He stayed down deep, blowing pearls each side of his face, his hair waving like seaweed, until Howie grew anxious. But he turned away indifferently – you couldn’t treat a boy like he was a girl and fuss over him. There were risks a boy had to take. He saw how the trampoline would break your neck if you came down wrong or hit the side, but he didn’t say it – didn’t even think it after a while. Let Darlene say it: ‘be careful’ was a woman’s job.
‘He’ll drown, Howie.’
‘No he won’t, he knows what he’s doing.’
On his first swim in the pool Damon had brought up Darlene’s stone. Howie said, ‘Don’t touch that stone down there,’ but the boy was gone, as smooth as oil, into the deep end, trailing pearls. He had the stone, found it, innocent, and brought it up, held it high – ‘Look’t I got.’
‘Sorry, love, he didn’t know,’ Howie said to Darlene, but her mouth had darkened into that O that meant she really was upset and she had turned and gone into the house. Howie took the stone from Damon and explained to him and threw it back, and Darlene tried for it once or twice, half-heartedly, but the fun had gone out of the lesson for Howie. He didn’t care whether she got it or not.
‘He likes your cooking.’
‘I like cooking for him,’ she replied.
At first he did not think it was true. Her brightness in the kitchen seemed no more than quickness to him. He had liked watching her with her knives and mixers and ingredients, and enjoyed tasting things before they were done, but she did not seem to welcome him any more. It’ll come right, he thought, she just needs time; and slowly Darlene began to change. She made herself easier and happier with the boy. Howie was disturbed by it, for it seemed behaviour she had decided on and was putting into practice. Touch Damon, smile at him, laugh and talk, and clap when he does his tricks on the trampoline. She’s making herself fond of him, Howie thought. You can’t do that. But it seemed that Darlene could. He watched her nervously and with respect. Making love to her, he became less sure of what he did. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t do it so much, with the boy in the house.’ Soon he used that as an excuse.
‘Call her Darlene, don’t say Grandma,’ he told Damon.
‘Sure,’ Damon said, and used the name unselfconsciously.
Darlene was old-fashioned enough to be uneasy about it, but Howie said, ‘You can’t switch things like that on and off. It’s better if you’re just a kind of friend.’
‘I feel more like his mother than his grandma, anyway,’ Darlene said. ‘Howie, Damon should be at school.’
‘It’s only one more week. They only go on picnics. He can start again next year.’
‘He’s staying here next year, is he?’
‘Yeah, I guess. Is that okay?’
‘I don’t mind, Howie. In fact I like it. I just like to be told, that’s all.’
‘So I’m telling you.’
‘It gives me something to do. As long as someone doesn’t come and take him away suddenly.’
‘Athol won’t. And Ulla can’t, for sure.’
‘That’s another thing, Howie. He should be writing to her.’
What were all these ‘shoulds’ from Darlene now? She jabbed the word at him and he didn’t like it. But he found he couldn’t bully her any more and was forced to treat her carefully.
‘I’m going down to Wellington next week,’ he said to Damon. ‘Why don’t you write a letter and I’ll take it to your mother?’ He half expected a burst of tears from the boy – and if that happened he would blame Darlene. But Damon only said, ‘Sure. What day?’
So Howie took an envelope labelled ‘Mum’ on his next trip. It lay in his briefcase with his papers and his half of Johnny Walker Black, and it seemed to tick there like a bomb. It might say, I want to come home. It might say, I don’t like it here, I want to live with Grandma and Olivia. Howie felt dizzy when he thought of it. He had to leave the meeting for the toilet and splash water on his face. Tony Dorio came in and frowned at him.
‘You all right, Howie?’
‘Sure. I just can’t stand Ronnie rabbiting on.’
‘You’re the chairman, you can stop him.’
‘I can’t concentrate today. Look, Tony, I’m not coming back. Fill in for me.’
‘There’s this thing about our friends over the way I want to bring up.’
‘What about them?’
‘They’re still on about a district scheme change. All they need to do is publicly notify it. Then they can say, No permit mate.’
‘They haven’t got the nerve,’ Howie said. He was the one who had the nerve. There was nothing left to fight about in Kitchener. That battle had been won when he’d out-manoeuvred Cora Dunwoodie.
‘The environment committee’s meeting now,’ Dorio said. ‘I think we should stay around and hear what they decide.’
‘You stay around, Tony. Look, we’ve got it sewed up tight. They’re on an ego trip. Now I’m going. Just sink that bloody restaurant, will you?’
He ordered a taxi for the hospital but half way there he said to the driver, ‘Do you know a kids’ playground up by the pines, over Newtown?’
‘Yeah, maybe.’
‘Take me there.’ He wanted to put off delivering the letter.
The taxi climbed in narrow streets, through cuttings faced with concrete, and stopped at an iron gate leading into a park. Two swings and a seesaw stood in dusty hollows in the grass. A hurricane wire fence ran up one side. The thistles where the woman had punched his wallet grew up against it like a hedge. He looked for her but the park was empty.
‘You getting out?’ the driver said.
‘No.’
There had been swings at Falls Park. He had been able to turn them almost over the bar. The squeak of swings, the iron shriek – he would never forget. The woman with the baby seemed to be in that place too, standing in the paspalum by the changing shed.
‘What do you reckon about a restaurant here?’
‘Restaurant? You’re joking, mate. A soup kitchen, maybe.’
‘Is that someone sleeping in the grass?’ He saw two bare soles like white faces looking at him.
‘Yeah, some wino. Junkie maybe.’
Or someone with nowhere else to go, Howie thought. He told the driver to take him to the hospital. There he walked through corridors, turning his eyes away from the sickness: men younger than him being wheeled in chairs and breathing oxygen in plastic tents. There was something cowardly about it. The man in the park was braver, lying in the grass. When your health was gone you should keel over and die, not put other people to this trouble. What it meant, when you came to it: Ulla should die. Howie could face things like that.
He sat down to wait until she opened her eyes, and could not help looking at her, looking for Ulla. Her hair seemed darker. It was dry and scurfy inside the brace screwed to her head. One of her eyes showed a streak of eyeball, yellow-white. He could not see her as a woman any more. Her face was fatter, but her body must be wasting away: was that what happened, the muscles lying thin, and no messages getting through to help them stay alive? The collar round her neck marked her live parts from her dead. It looked greasy inside, and the sheepskin in the plastic armour that encased her sides had bare patches, like a moult.
‘Howie,’ she said. ‘What a nice surprise.’
‘Hallo, Ulla. I brought you a letter from Damon. He’s doing well.’
‘Damon?’
Sure, your son, he almost said.
He took the envelope from his briefcase. ‘It says “Mum”. See?’
‘“Mum”. That’s me?’
I didn’t come to play games, Howie thought. ‘I’ll leave it. One of the nurses can
read it to you.’
‘No. I’m tired of nurses. You,’ she said.
‘If that’s what you want.’
‘First, though, have you got a drink?’
‘Water, you want?’
‘I want some whisky, Howie. Gwen said you carry it in your bag.’
He moved his leg to hide the briefcase, then realised she could not see down there. ‘I’m not sure … ’ meaning to say ‘I’ve got any left,’ but was impatient with the lie. ‘Do they let you have that sort of stuff?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I can’t … ’
‘I thought you were the man who broke the rules?’
‘That’s me, not you.’
‘Think how they’ve got me, Howie. All tied up.’
‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘So I want a drink, to remember what it tastes like, one more time.’
‘All right.’
He was afraid. He took the bottle from his bag and poured half an inch in her water glass. What if she choked? Could she cough? What if he killed her?
‘How … ?’
‘Just a sip. Just wet my lips with it.’
He let some whisky run into her mouth – half a teaspoon, that was all. Ulla gasped.
‘It’s not like akvavit.’
‘Is that what you drank?’
‘My father drank. Whisky is not so nice.’
‘You asked for it.’
‘Yes, I did. But a little bit of water now, please.’
‘What’ll I do with this?’
‘Drink it, Howie. Drink to my health.’
He did not like that. He could not tell what she aimed at him. And he did not want to put her glass to his mouth.
‘You must say skål.’
Whisky was a disinfectant – one gulp, he thought. ‘Skole! Okay, water.’
He poured some in the glass and put the rim carefully on her lip – saw how dry it was and how dry, bone dry, her teeth. Poor bitch, he thought; tied up is right. She should be allowed to die.
‘Now read the letter,’ she said.
He tore it open. He had lost his anxiety. Damon would say good things.
‘“Dear Mum,”’ he read, ‘“Grandpa’s going to take this letter to you. I’ve been up here for two weeks and it’s cool.” Cool means – ’